When you’re a single father and your only son was just drafted by the Giants with the ninth-overall pick in the NFL draft, you feel like you’ve been drafted, too.

So it was perfectly fitting that Everald Flowers, the 43-year-old father of tackle Ereck Flowers, the Giants’ first-round pick, was with his son on Friday — touring the team facility, meeting coach Tom Coughlin and general manager Jerry Reese, lunching, taking pictures and sharing his son’s dream.

It was perfectly fitting that Everald Flowers, who has been the central figure in Ereck’s life, was a part of Friday’s whirlwind visit that included taking in the Mets-Nationals game at Citi Field, where his son threw out the ceremonial first pitch.

“I don’t even know what day it is right now,’’ Everald Flowers told The Post by phone while he and Ereck were being driven to the ballpark. “Everything has just been happening so fast.’’

From the sincere sounds of the father’s voice over the phone and from everything the Giants coaches and scouting department have unearthed on their most crucial draft investment of 2015, it sounds as if all of this could not be happening to a more deserving father and son.

Ever since Ereck Flowers, at age 6, lost his mother, Tanya Stokes, to stomach cancer at age 30, it has been him and his father on their own.

Everald Flowers had plans to marry Stokes, whom he met in Kansas while playing Division II football for Washburn University in Topeka, but the cancer took her first.

“We were planning on [marrying], and then things just struck, just came and put a monkey wrench into everything,’’ Everald Flowers said. “We knew she was sick, but we didn’t know the severity of it.’’

About a year after Stokes passed, Everald and Ereck moved to Miami, where he lived as a child after spending his first six years in Brooklyn, near Coney Island.

“I wanted [Ereck] to have a good childhood despite the circumstances,’’ Everald Flowers said. “I just did everything I felt I possibly could and made him a priority. We got involved in sports. Sports was his outlet and our bonding. We just didn’t know it would get to this level.’’

Ereck Flowers played for the Miami Hurricanes.AP

“This level’’ — if all works out to plan — is Ereck Flowers being a Giant for life, spending the next decade or so manning one of the tackle positions on their offensive line.

There is some delicious irony to father and son as football players: Everald played outside linebacker, spending his time trying to beat offensive tackles like his son.

“Through [Ereck] I learned to appreciate O-linemen,’’ Everald Flowers said jokingly.
The father said it is “slowly sinking in, starting to register’’ that his son is going to be playing in the NFL.

“I guess when I see the first game it’ll really, really be registered in,’’ he said. “It is surreal. We were just meeting Coach Coughlin, and I’m looking at Coach Coughlin and saying, ‘That’s Coach Coughlin. Wow. We’re sitting across from him.’ Real nice guy.”

The scouting reports on Flowers from Coughlin, Reese and Giants vice president of player evaluation Marc Ross were all the same: quiet young man with a “nasty streak’’ on the field.

“Yeah, he’s a quiet person,’’ Everald Flowers said. “He doesn’t go out, he doesn’t hang out. He plays the game with a lot of passion, and he speaks loudly out there [on the field]. He’s going to play hard every down. He plays a violent sport, and he plays it well and people get surprised sometimes saying, ‘Man, this quiet kid is playing so hard and he has a nasty streak.’ ’’

Coughlin termed what Flowers does as “arriving in a bad humor at a pile.’’
“One of the things when you talk to the coaches down there, it’s like this guy doesn’t take any crap from anybody,’’ Reese said.

Does that come from his father?

“I don’t know,’’ Everald Flowers said. “He takes things really seriously. He’s very dedicated to getting himself ready to play the game. I tried to instill that in him.’’
Coughlin said he has “read page after page’’ of his scouts’ notes on Flowers and loves what he has read. One of the common denominators to everything he has read about Flowers is the importance of his father in his life.

“Everything we hear [is] he is very, very close with his dad,’’ Coughlin said. “His dad is with him all the time. At his workout, his dad was there. I think that is a very strong relationship and I think that points to a very solid young man.’’